The Down Range Forum
Member Section => Down Range Cafe => Topic started by: Hazcat on April 18, 2009, 04:16:01 AM
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The three quick shots off the fantail of the USS Bainbridge that terminated the piracy incident in the Indian Ocean early Sunday night made a number of points for various pointy-headed political pundits to chew on, cudlike, for a few weeks. But one they'll probably miss is the following: The three shots make clear to a wider public what has been clear to people who pay attention to such things -- we are in the golden age of the sniper.
He has become a kind of chivalric hero. He is the state, speaking in thunder, restoring order to the moral universe. Or he is civilization, informing the barbarians of the fecklessness of their plight. He is the line in the sand, the point of the spear, the man with the rifle, one of the few, the proud. He is also the intellectual of combat, in some ways, bringing a cool logic to what is normally hot, messy and exhausting.
We vest in him the right to kill in our name and it seems, at least to some extent, we no longer hold it against him that he does so from a long way out, usually in darkness and silence. Instead, we wish him godspeed. He's no longer Lee Harvey Oswald. He's Carlos Hatchcock, the legendary Marine Corps sniper, or Chuck Mawhinney, who holds the Marine Corps sniper kill record in Vietnam, or the two posthumous Battle of Mogadishu Medal of Honor recipients, the Delta snipers Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon. And now, he is the Navy SEALs who shot the Somali pirates and saved Capt. Richard Phillips.
Technology and necessity have combined to make the sniper the go-to guy in military operations, even given him a kind of glamour.
The business of felling a bad guy with one shot has never been more refined. Briefly -- this isn't Guns & Ammo, after all -- new optical hardware and ballistic innovations have made the sniper more effective than he's ever been. Since Vietnam, the military sniper weapon has been a bolt-action .30-caliber Remington rifle, effective to a thousand yards. In the past two decades, however, heavier-caliber weapons have been deployed to greatly further the shooter's range.
Now, using .50-caliber weapons, snipers regularly hit beyond a mile, and there's a whole new lineup of weapons between .30 and .50 calibers -- the .338 Lapua, the .416 Barrett, the .408 CheyTac -- that commandeer the range between 1,000 and 2,000 yards. On top of that, laser range-finding and chip-driven portable software enable the shooter to solve heretofore impenetrable ballistic equations, and index their sights precisely for that one-shot kill way, way out there.
Sunday's mission demanded the utmost in skill and concentration, this after an arduous trek inward (by parachute and small boat to the Bainbridge at near dark on Saturday). Details will emerge, but I'm guessing the three SEALs were each equipped with a rifle called the SR-25, said to be the choice of SEAL snipers. It's a semiautomatic, for fast follow-up shots, and looks like an M-16 on growth hormones.
It almost certainly wears a tube at the muzzle, what you would call a silencer, what the community calls a suppressor. The point, for this kind of shooting, is that it's unlikely the three shooters would try to fire simultaneously; they probably shot over a few seconds, and the unthwarted report of the first rifle might have caused Targets 2 and 3 to withdraw. As it transpired, no pirate likely figured out what happened to his colleagues in the seconds before it happened to him.
Perhaps the pirates didn't realize the SEALs would be equipped with the refined technology of night vision. They thought they were safe, crouching behind the cabin of their life boat, peering over it at the big dark bulk of the Bainbridge 50 feet or so ahead. Actually, they were quite obvious to the shooters eyeing them through a somewhat awkward device, like a telescopic lens, but bloated, more complex, more powerful, built around the ability to intensify the ambient light. To the snipers, the pirates were as green as the witch in "The Wizard of Oz," and their eyes glowed. Meanwhile, some kind of index point -- cross hairs, a chevron, a simple glowing dot -- marked the bullet's point of impact, having been adjusted to the proper range in advance.
One thing that suggests the Navy may have had this ending in mind all along was the command decision to tow the lifeboat to calmer waters. Even at a relatively short range, shooting for blood from one vessel to another in high, rough seas would be a challenge difficult to meet, much less three times, more or less simultaneously.
So what is going on in the sniper's mind as he waits -- I'm guessing he's prone, the most stable shooting position -- in the dark, on the overhang at the extreme rear of the ship? He's crucially aware of his breathing rhythm, because he wants to fire between breaths. He probably doesn't think much about trigger pull. He wouldn't be here if he didn't know how to pull a tri gger. He's not "pulling" it in the sense of exerting his muscle against it, so much as urging it to cooperate it, massaging it into doing his bidding. If he hurries, if his finger is misplaced on its curve or catches on the trigger guard beneath it, it can all go wrong.
It can go wrong, too, if he neglects the follow-through, because like all athletic endeavors, shooting or pitching or throwing or tossing a crumple of paper into a wastebasket, the issue is the wholeness of motion, even long after the missile is dispatched.
Oh, and he has to do all that on instant notice with someone's life on the line, and if he misses, the burden of shame will be crushing.
What does he feel? The joke, much told, is that when asked what he felt when he took a man's life, the sniper answered, "Recoil." I suspect that's nonsense. But I also suspect these men are pure alphas, with unnatural levels of aggression and strength, which is magnified by their willingness to drive such larger questions down deeper and hold them far away from the duty mind. What they feel, then, is simple: None of your damn business.
Hunter, a former chief film critic at The Washington Post, is the creator of a series of novels featuring the sniper Bob Lee Swagger. His next book, to be published in October, is "I, Sniper."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/13/AR2009041302583.html?sid=ST2009041303140
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Nice article.... too bad it doesn't look like he actually spoke to anyone involved in the incident and his info on the opinion of the guys who get handed SR-25s differs from what I've heard. When we were taping for TBD:S at BWTC we even addressed the "myth" of the .308 being preferred by everyone in the middle east with one of their instructors who wore the T-shirt. The fact that the .308 mags didn't even fit in their gear and that the 77gr 5.56 was performing just fine were both part of the conversation. Fiction Writer becomes creative commentator and gets to plug his upcoming book.
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Mornin', Rob.
So what twist rate and barrel length is best for those 77 grainers?
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Not sure, but I can find out for you. I was hearing great things about the heavy 5.56 from the Army side years ago and the Navy backgrounds at BWTC were echoing their thoughts when the topic came up recently. Still not optimal for 800+, but the shots are rarely close to that far off.
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Not sure, but I can find out for you. I was hearing great things about the heavy 5.56 from the Army side years ago and the Navy backgrounds at BWTC were echoing their thoughts when the topic came up recently. Still not optimal for 800+, but the shots are rarely close to that far off.
Please do.
Thanks
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I believe 1:7" is best for 77 grain bullets, but 1:9" works great for 62 grain ball. Carbine length barrels are less than ideal for either weight.
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I shot 75gr BTHP (handloads) out of my 1:9" twist AR for years. Very accurate. Got around a 1/2" group
at 100yds.
Rifle was a mismatch of parts: Olympic Arms lower, Colt upper, Wilson barrel, JP trigger, Tasco 6-24 rangefinding
scope.
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Junkie,
Is that a 24" and full float? What gas block are you using?
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Junkie,
Is that a 24" and full float? What gas block are you using?
Yes to the barrel. I have no idea what gas block it is, the upper was already assembled (minus bipod) when I picked it up.
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Stole this off another forum.
.224 CF
- 7" for bullets heavier than 80gr.
- 8" for bullets up to 80gr.
- 9" for bullets up to 70gr.
- 12" for bullets up to 63gr.
- 14" for bullets up to 55gr.
- 15" for bullets up to 55gr. driven 4,100 fps or more
- 16" for bullets up to 55gr. driven 4,300 fps or more
The above is a copy and paste from Douglas Premium Barrels
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Twist rate is a decent point of beginning, but more important is velocity and rpm, that is the difference between short and long barrels, in a given twist rate, I'm gonna paste a few things here for you guys to chew on.
1st, The formula for RPM:
(Muzzle velocity in fps) X 720
------------------------------ = RPM of bullet
(Twist in inches)
2nd,: An interesting question is why does the bullet disintegrate down
: range and not right away at the muzzle?
: The answer is that the most internal forces are generated when the
: over-stabilized bullet must follow an arcing trajectory, so it
: disintegrates when its trajectory starts requiring it to go where
: its not pointing.
I think the jacket will be under stress from centrifugal force for only
long enough for it to go past its yield point, then it will fracture.
Seems to me the greatest stress on the jacket comes from spinning the
bullet; not its downrange path or trajectory.
Some bullets have jackets thin enough that when some deep-grooved barrels
shoot 'em, the jackets thickness at the bottom of the engraved groove
won't hold 'em together at even the minimum RPM rate to stablize them.
Boots Obermeyer (match-grade barrel maker) designed his 5R rifling style
to compensate for this very thing. His barrels typically have deeper
grooves than others. This is fine as they last a bit longer. But the
005-in. deep grooves were engraving the Sierra 7mm 168-gr. HPMK bullet
too much in the 1970s; a lot of 'em were flying apart in the first 100
yards of flight. So, Boots designed a rifling groove with the sides
angled instead of straight up and down. The lands, with their beveled
edges, engraved the bullets with less stress at the edge points and the
168-gr. bullets no longer came apart. As luck would be, this same 5R
rifling style also shot the longer, heavier 30 caliber match bullets
more accurately than the traditional square-edged rifling.
: Taking another look at the assumptions,
: it was assumed that the coeff. of drag (Cd) was constant and this is
: not true. The faster the bullet, the lower the Cd. This means the
: drag does not quite increase as v^2 so faster bullets will be more
: stable than predicted by the simple Greenhill formula which depends
: only on the twist.
Hooray for you! Few people realize that the (almost 100-year old)
Greenhill formula was created when muzzle velocities were in the 1300 to
1900 fps range for rifles. And most bullets were flat-nozed, flat-based
lead ones.
And one should note that Sierra is about the only bullet company that
says their bullets have two or three BCs; each in a different velocity
range. Even aeronautical engineers know that a plane's aerodynamic
characterists change somewhat with speed. Why should bullets be any
different?
: The point is that the stability should still be more sensitive to
: twist than velocity, so although an RPM range would be useful for
: practical guns and velocities used, there may be a more accurate
: way to give the lower stability limit in general. I'll try and
: come up with more quantitative results.
I've talked to some physics gurus who have some interest in the spinning
bullet syndrome. If you can get some definitive answers, that's great.
Meanwhile, I'm gonna talk with Sierra's folks and find out what neat
and wonderful things they might consider putting in their next revision
of their loading manual.
Speaking of RPMs, velocities and twists, compare the commonly used twist
rates vs. velocity vs. bullet caliber/weight/shape across the various
handgun and shouldergun scenerios. Short, fat, blunt nozed bullets just
don't spin very fast to be accurate. Long, skinny, pointy-nosed, tapered
butt, high-speed paper and game punchers really spin seemingly close to
the speed of light and fall just about on top of each other in a group.
BB